social.noyu.me

a thing that really irks me about git: the “author date” in commits. imho, if you make non-trivial changes to a commit when amending it, you should update that date; and if you squash several commits together, you should use the date of the latest one. neither is the default…

you can use --reset-author when editing a commit, but not many people seem to know of that.

meanwhile using git merge --squash to do a squash merge of someone else’s work makes you the author now, and makes the date the current time. I don’t like that either.

for amending, I feel like changing the default behaviour is never going to happen. on the other hand, maybe I’ll eventually submit a patch to git to add an alternative squash mode…

in the meantime, I am using a very particular, manual process for all my git merges.

@hikari when I am elected president, —amend will retain previous versions of the commit by default, and squash will be non-destructive.

@richardstephens ooh, how would you do that?

@hikari Instead of actually squashing, generate an empty commit with metadata that indicates "treat the past 7 commits as one squashed commit". Even better, bisect, could know to jump between only squashed commits.

@hikari You could also make an "amended" commit actually a branch that's hidden from most of the UI. Both of these solutions would be backwards compatible too, although I freely admit to not having thought through all the implications.

@richardstephens honestly it sounds to me like what you want are actual merges

@richardstephens @hikari I mean they’re in your reflog, nobody else needs to see the crimes I squash out before pushing

@saagar @hikari where I’m coming from is that there’s often a trade off between “clean history with messy intermediate states discarded” and “all intermediate states kept but history is an unintelligible mess”. I think it would be neat if we could have tools that would only surface a clean curated view of history by default but also had the more detailed view available in the rare case it’s needed.

@richardstephens @hikari I’d like this but I don’t generally want anything but the curated history to leave my computer